


A living legend

by intravenusann



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Motherhood, War is hell, you could see Finn/Poe if you wanted to
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-01
Updated: 2016-02-01
Packaged: 2018-05-16 15:37:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5831167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intravenusann/pseuds/intravenusann
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Live long enough and everyone reminds you of someone you already knew.</p>
<p>(Leia reflects on the new trio.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A living legend

**Author's Note:**

> My co-conspirator [Marty](emmeldraws.tumblr.com) wanted me to write more of Leia and the new trio and oops it ended up rather sad. I love Leia so much and I hope this does her justice.

She had considered Shara Bey to be a friend, one gained from perseverance through mutual trial. Leia stood in the doorway to the medical bay and watched Poe Dameron hold his friend’s limp hand. The bonds forged through helping one another survive — she knew how deep those could run.

Despite that close bond, they had rarely spoken of one thing they both had in common — even as it weighed on them both more and more.

“I wish we had… waited a little,” Share had admitted — once, and only because Leia pressed the question. They were at the tail end of a war, but still very much at war and Leia remembers how she could barely keep down water every morning.

It was awful.

“Yeah, but when is a good time, really?” she had joked.

“There’s never a convenient time for kids,” Shara had said. “You can just forget about _convenience_ from now on.”

Young as she was, she wondered how Shara could be so strong — away from her husband and her child.

No matter how many times she thought, “This would never have happened under Shara Bey’s watch.” it only filled her with regret. Her death had felt like a slap in the face. Worse somehow because the war was supposed to be _over_. This wasn’t supposed to happen anymore.

She had held her own son’s hand, only a few years younger than Shara’s.

“I’ll go alone. I know you can take good care of him.”

“No problem, sweetheart.” His voice always tender with them. “You hear that, Ben? You’re hanging out with me for another week.”

If she could, she would call Kes Dameron now and ask him how she was supposed to keep getting up in the morning.

While she watched, Poe lowered his head to the metal edge of the bed. He turned his face and drew his friend’s hand close to his mouth. It was not a kiss, but Leia recognized intimacy when she saw it. She knew when to look away.

Poe Dameron was not her son — no, they were only close in age and shared the same coloring and made her afraid every day that he would be killed in a fight that she couldn’t get him out of. When she met with him, she hadn’t felt so conflicted in a long time.

Kes and Shara’s son fighting for the Resistance! It was certainly the Force at work.

But there were no “safe” missions against the First Order and Poe was more than willing to take even the riskiest.

“I could have gotten him killed,” she reflects. “A hundred times already.”

And so she could not call Kes Dameron, because she knew what he would think — getting a holo-comm message from General Leia Organa.

She rarely delivered good news anymore.

\---

When her brother returns, her sadness does not disappear. They smile; they embrace. But Luke’s eyes are mirrors — reflecting all her grief, all her failures.

“The Force is growing stronger,” he warns her, as though they both can’t feel it. “Those who can tap into it have even more power than before.”

“Snoke will be stronger then,” she says. “Harder to kill.”

“Perhaps impossible,” Luke says.

“No,” she says, with fear sending stomach acid up her throat. “No one is impossible to kill.”

“Immortality has a strong appeal to people like Snoke,” he says, and she knows it’s a warning. But they don’t _know_. And even if they knew, she would find a way even if she had to do it herself. Her mouth, thinned by age, becomes a tight line of restraint. She closes her hand into a fist, then opens it.

“If the Force is stronger,” she says, “then so are you.”

“I’m an old man, Leia,” he says.

She just _looks_ at him.

“So what? I’m an old woman,” she says. “Just look at me! But I’m not going to let Snoke win.”

“We had thought we’d won,” Luke says. “There will always be another Snoke.”

She sighs and rolls her eyes at him. “Luke.”

“Leia,” he says.

“Luke,” she says, harder. Because she is even angrier than he is. She is even more bitter. She is even more _alone_ — and she still raised this continued Resistance around her and kept it going despite everything. Or literally to spite it. Sometimes her anger is all that gets her out of bed.

“We will do it,” she says. “We will find a way.”

And it’s awful, but when she looks at Rey she knows what that way is.

It is hard enough not to think of Poe Dameron as a child — as Kes and Shara’s little boy — but Rey _looks_ so young. The age she gave to a medical intake officer, however, is only slightly older than Leia was when she found herself held captive by the man she didn’t know was her father. He was never a father to her.

“I had parents,” Rey insisted during her intake, but she fell silent and did not make eye contact when asked their names. All of this is written down for Leia to review.

“Everyone has parents,” Finn said, during his own intake. “I never knew mine.”

She can only imagine that he told her as much — perhaps that is one of the thousand reasons they are so close. She knows what it is to fight at someone’s side, to rescue and be rescued.

Leia thought she remembered her mother, but she had died when she was only an infant. She has seen images of Padmé Amadala, however, and the resemblance between her and Breha Organa is easy to see.

At least she had enough to lose so much, she reminds herself. Rey has not even had that.

Leia tolerates Luke’s flat joke about Rey looking like a long-lost daughter only because it is perhaps true. As true as Breha Organa is the queen of Naboo — a lie to make it easier to sleep at night.

But Leia doesn’t see herself in Rey so much as she sees her husband and Luke. That is not a joke, however, that she can bring herself to make. “Really? Because she’s more like yours. Something you wanted to tell me about you and Han.” No, it’s not fair to any of them.

Rey keeps Poe Dameron enraptured in the mess hall with a story about flying the Millennium Falcon, which is still as much of a heap of garbage as it was thirty years ago (or worse). But the way she speaks of it, with love and admiration, is familiar. The way she flies it, even more so.

“I can fly anything too,” she tells Poe, and Leia knows he’s going to test that.

She remembers telling Poe that he’s the best pilot since her brother and it’s still true, but Rey seems ready to challenge him for that honor.

“How long have you been flying?” she overhears Poe ask Rey.

She shrugs. “Not long.”

Poe’s face wrinkles up in disbelief — it’s all about the shape of his mouth and the angle of his eyebrows. He whistles, low and long.

They couldn’t look more different, but in spirit, talent and sense of humor Rey could easily have been Shara Bey’s daughter. The Force pushes Leia toward Rey with insistent, familiar hands. In her dreams, she puts her arm around Han’s waist and rests her head against his shoulder.

“I like this one,” he tells her. “Thinking of offering her a job.”

\---

The former Stormtrooper treats her with more deference than anyone else in the Resistance. But there is no way to tell him that she is not a legend, because she isn’t a legend to him. She is his _General_ and he stands stiff-backed and unblinking when she addresses him.

It is only around his friends, at a distance, that she sees he is, in fact, full of smiles and laughter.

But when Rey is training with Luke, when Poe is sent away on missions, Finn goes quiet as a ship that has run out of reserve power. He becomes a moon without the light of a star to reflect off it.

He is studious and a fast learner. Once he is cleared for it, he throws himself into flight simulations and datapads on binary and Republic history. By far, he is the best shot on the base including herself. But he doesn’t check behind him when he uses the base’s blaster range.

Leia stands behind him and waits.

When he’s done, he puts the safety back in place on the blaster and lets it hang in his hand. His shoulders slump and he stares at his feet instead of his accuracy stats on the simulation.

“Thirty-four out of thirty-six shots on target,” Leia says. “Very efficient.”

Finn startles into a salute, then his hand shakes and he drops it.

“General,” he says. “Ma’am.”

“You can call me Leia,” she says, because if Poe Dameron is like a son to her and Rey could be her daughter, then Finn is hers because he is theirs. She feels a duty toward him — to provide a life that the First Order could never offer him. Instead, she needs soldiers and he is one, born-and-bred.

He looks at her, a bit wide-eyed with panic.

“I don’t bite,” she promises.

Finn looks like he doesn’t know what a joke is, which Leia knows he does. She sighs and waves it off.

“Look, Finn, I know you’re very close to Poe and Rey,” she says.

Finn nods a little despite his rigid posture. “Yes, ma’am.”

“No need to ‘yes, ma’am’ at me,” she tells him. “I know they’re away right now and that’s… That’s my fault. You can blame me.

“No, ma—” Finn smartly cuts himself off. “No way. I wouldn’t do that. They’re doing their jobs. Rey has to learn and Poe has to fly. I don’t need them around all the time.”

“Well, you’ve been moping,” she says. She holds her thumb and index finger apart. “Just a little.”

Finn frowns and his shoulders slump.

“Sorry ma—Sorry,” Finn says.

“You don’t need to be sorry about it,” she says. “I just want to make sure you know that you’re valued here. All of Poe’s little friends think you’re just the best thing since someone figured out how to put chocolate in hurdues.”

She could swear Finn’s blushing.

“The pilots?” he asks. “I like them, they’re just… intense.”

“That’s kind of you,” she says. “You can call them crazy, if you want.”

“Not crazy,” Finn insists. “Alright, maybe a little crazy.”

She reaches out and up to give Finn a pat on the shoulder.

“There you go,” she says.

It bothers her that he is so alone when they aren’t around, but she cannot truly fix Finn’s loneliness. He is one-of-a-kind. Or surely the Resistance would have heard of it before — people defecting from the First Order, turning against it.

“I won’t blame you, though,” Finn says, which catches Leia so far off guard that her hand lingers on his arm. He’s a big kid, in a different way than most of the people around the base.

“Rey and Lu—your brother, they’re the only ones with the power to go after the Supreme Leader and Kylo,” Finn says. “But the First Order is trying to act as a distraction, so you’ve got to keep sending Poe out — he’s your best pilot.”

“But I’ve got three pilots just as good out hunting after Snoke,” Leia thinks.

“You’re using your resources as best you can,” Finn says. “I mean, Rey’s a great pilot and I’m good at shooting things, but Poe’s the whole package. It won’t matter how many TIE fighters we shoot down unless Rey can... can bring you back Snoke’s head on a plate.”

“I like the sound of that,” Leia says.

“Maybe with a bow on it,” Finn adds.

Leia smiles.

“It’s just smart,” Finn says, nodding. “Though…”

“What?” Leia asks, cocking an eyebrow at him.

“Well,” Finn says. “I wouldn’t want to question your authority, but I’m not sure why we keep waiting for the First Order to strike somewhere first.”

She raises both eyebrows. “Do you have something you’d like to tell me about, Finn?”

“Maybe?” Finn replies.

They walk together, to her office on the far end of the base compound.

She hopes that someday people tell legends about a man so brave he walked away from evil just to run right back into its jaws to save the world, to save his friends.


End file.
